“Microsoft is making a mobile version of its Word, Excel and PowerPoint products available for iPhone users via its Office 365 subscription plan,” Mary Jo Foley reports for ZDNet. “The roll-out begins starting June 14 in the U.S., with additional availability in 135 additional markets and 29 languages to follow next week. The Office Mobile for iPhone suite is available in the Apple app store.”

Foley reports, “The Office Mobile for iPhone suite is very much like the Office Mobile suite that Microsoft preloads on Windows Phone, meaning it is optimized for the editing, viewing and creation of Word and Excel documents. (Microsoft has offered OneNote for the iPhone since 2011.) While the new Office Mobile for iPhone suite can be used at 2X resolution on iPads, it is not optimized for that platform, Microsoft officials said.”

“Current and future Office 365 subscribers will be able to get Office Mobile for iPhone for use on up to five iPhones for free. These five devices won’t count against the five-device usage rights that Office 365 subscribers currently have with Office 365 plans that include Office client access,” Foley reports. “In other words, if you are an Office 365 subscriber, you can use Office 2013 or Office for Mac 2011 on a combination of five PCs and Macs plus Office for iPhone on five iPhones.”

“For the iPad, Microsoft is steering people toward its Office web apps,” Dana Wollman reports for Engadget. “To run Office, you’ll need an iPhone 4, 4S or 5 (or a fifth-gen iPod touch) running iOS 6.1 or higher. Since you already have [the required US$99.99/year] Office 365 subscription, you won’t need to create any new usernames or passwords; just enter the email address associated with your Office / Microsoft account, followed by the password.”

“We can’t tell if Microsoft deliberately handicapped Office Mobile for iPhone, or if it’s simply saving some features for a later update. (A company rep declined to comment on what we can expect from future versions.) We’re willing to believe Microsoft still has some unfinished items on its to-do list, but even so, it’s a shame that iPhone users waited this long for an Office app, only to get something with such a minimal feature set,” Wollman reports. “All told, Office Mobile represents a good enough start for Microsoft, and in some ways it’s better than Google Drive, particularly where spreadsheets are concerned. Still, it’s miles behind other office apps for iOS, including Apple iWork.”

They don’t. The only App Store requirement is that they can’t sell their Office 365 crap subscription from within the app. So MS will have to depend on people signing up with them on their website, and then downloading the app.

Your problem is you are trying to equate company performance with stock price. That’s incorrect.

Wall Street and major investors do not care how well a company is doing. All they care about is how they can make money from the stock, whether buying, holding or selling. Whether Apple is healthy or not has very little to do with how AAPL performs.

How stupid that they restrict this to only the iPhone. Guess they are still holding out hope that their flop of a tablet will have some imaginary competitive advantage? We see how well that has worked for them so far…

MS has been working on mobile versions of its office suite for quite a while, and naturally it prioritized the Win8 and WinRT ports. Next up is the iOS port. I don’t see why people find competition and choice to be a bad thing. For how much MDN pisses all over MS Office, it has never been able to give an objective assessment as to what features iWork offers that Office does not. The versions of Office that are ribbon-free are actually quite good — and both Word and Excel are vastly more powerful than any other word processor or spreadsheet.

That being said, we will avoid subscription-based computing because it is almost always a horrible value, from MS or Apple, or anyone else. Open Office for iOS wins.

This is complete BS, even by Microsoft standards. Pay $100 a year for an Office suite that can only be accessed with an Internet connection? Looks like the xbox insanity has spread to the Office group.

The Information Week article shows that Office for iPhone isn’t quite as bad as I originally thought. It is an iOS app, not a browser-based program, so Word and Excel documents can be created and edited without an internet connection and then synced to the cloud when a connection becomes available.